NVIDIA's Releasing An Overclocking Linux Driver Tomorrow

At long last NVIDIA is expected to release a new binary Linux driver tomorrow that will support GPU overclocking for the GeForce 400 series hardware and newer (Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell, inclusive). This first NVIDIA 337 series Linux driver release will also bring other new features.

While the NVIDIA Linux driver has long supported overclocking, going back nearly one decade with their original Linux CoolBits implementation, the past few years of NVIDIA GPUs haven't seen Linux overclocking support. NVIDIA's latest GPUs still support GPU core and video memory overclocking, and is exposed via the NVIDIA Windows driver, but hadn't been exposed via the NVIDIA Linux driver. Since Fermi the clocking situation has been much more complicated than older generations of GPUs... It wasn't a priority for NVIDIA's Unix/Linux team to provide such support but now with more gamers coming to Linux, they've finally implemented this feature.

Tomorrow's NVIDIA 337 beta driver release will offer GPU overclocking for most GeForce 400/500/600/700 series graphics cards. As with older generations, the CoolBits option must be set within the xorg.conf for this feature to be exposed via the nvidia-settings utility. Besides overclocking the hardware, underclocking can also be done if you so choose.

Other changes for the NVIDIA 337.10 beta driver include support for the GeForce GT 705 and GT 720 graphics cards and on the mobile side is support for the GeForce 830M, 840M, 845M, GTX 850M, GTX 860M, GTX 870M, and GTX 880M mobile Maxwell GPUs.

The NVIDIA 337 Linux driver also features improvements to the NVIDIA EGL driver (including reduced CPU/memory utilization), and support for several new EGL extensions: EGL_EXT_buffer_age, EGL_EXT_client_extensions, EGL_EXT_platform_base, and EGL_EXT_platform_x11. The NVIDIA Linux driver is getting closer to natively supporting Wayland. With the GLX code, the GLX_NV_delay_before_swap extension was also added.

Stay tuned for more information on the first NVIDIA 337 Linux beta driver in the coming hours... There will also be some NVIDIA 400/500/600/700 Linux overclocking benchmarks.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.